Be Like the Big Guys: Optimizing Hardware in the Software-Defined Data Center

It is only natural for companies across the world to
look at Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other “big guys” who have their server
infrastructures customized and fully cost-optimized. There are significant differences
in capabilities between most companies and a company like Google, but Enterprise
IT staff can still learn a lot from what the big guys do when it comes to
optimizing hardware in the software-defined data center (SDDC). First, we will
examine what the big guys do to be so successful.

Big
Guy Success Factors

The big guys – Google, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, etc.
– use optimized white box servers in their SDDCs. They do this because white
boxes are less expensive, infinitely more customizable, and often more
effective than standardized servers from big-name vendors. For example, a
company like Google has very specific needs in their servers that standardized
servers cannot offer, so the ability to customize and only buy servers to fit
their exact specifications enables Google, and anyone else using white boxes,
to optimize their infrastructure. Trying to customize standard off the shelf
servers to fit the needs of a large company takes a great deal of effort, and
with servers not doing exactly what they’re intended for, problems will arise
eventually. Both of these issues can be costly in the long run. By using white
boxes, which are cheaper from the outset, and meet specifications exactly, the
big guys have found a way to save money and create infrastructure that is
exactly right for what they want.

However,
it is nonsensical for almost every company to directly emulate the practices of
massive companies like Google, as there is no comparison to make in terms of
server infrastructure. Google famously has 8 data center campuses in the United
States and 7 more positioned around the world. The largest of these facilities
in the United States, located in Pryor Creek, Oklahoma, is estimated to have a
physical footprint of 980,000 square feet, and cost Google about $2 billion to build
and bring live. These data center facilities worldwide support near incomprehensible
amounts of data. For example as of March 2017, Google’s data centers process an
average of 1.2 trillion searches per year. Google doesn’t disclose exact
numbers regarding its data centers, but the total number of servers in the data
centers worldwide has been estimated at roughly 2.5 million. All of these facts
perfectly illustrate the difference between Google and its peers (and every
other company)[1].

To nurture white box compute initiatives across many industries,
the big guys work together to create standards and release technical
information to be used throughout the world. Facebook – another big guy in the
world of white box servers – began the Open Compute Project in 2011. This
project is now an organization made up of many large corporations (including
Apple, Cisco, Lenovo, Google, Goldman Sachs, and others) in which the open
sharing of data center technology is encouraged. This sharing promotes innovation,
and pushes the big guys further ahead of the pack in the server infrastructure race.
Therefore, smaller companies now can leverage the big guys’ expertise in their
data centers.

How
“Not-As-Big Guys” can be Successful

Despite
the unique capabilities and infrastructures the big guys have deployed, not-as-big
guys can leverage learnings from the big guys. Most companies will never have
15 global data centers or be part of an organization promoting unique and
innovative server designs, or be able to spend $2 billion on server
infrastructure. However, every company can still utilize perhaps the most important
aspect of the big guys’ massive data centers: the custom white box servers
inside of them. No matter how customized the Open Compute Project has made big
guys’ server infrastructure, the components inside the servers the big guys use
are best of class commodity parts. They are available for purchase by anyone. Secondly,
while the configurations of an organization like Google’s servers are often
unique, and often have some unique components, the use of virtualization
software, such as VMware and vSAN can be instrumental in allowing companies
much smaller than Google to fully optimize their servers. The first step for
these small companies is to invest in white boxes.

White box servers are custom built
from commodity parts to meet the specifications of each customer. In the past, the
impression of white boxes was that they were of a low build quality, with
little care for quality assurance. That may have been the case decades ago, but
today, white boxes are built with high quality and in many cases to higher
standards than machines from big-brand server companies.

Leveraging
the Power of White Box

The power of white box is that they are fully
customizable. Just as the big guys do, smaller companies can purchase white box
servers from a vendor like Equus to meet their exact specifications. Perhaps a
company needs lots of storage space, but not much compute power. Perhaps a
company wants dual high core count CPUs and numerous expansion slots built into
the motherboard to anticipate growth. A legacy server company cannot offer servers
optimized in these ways. But a white box vendor can do exactly what a buyer
wants, and build them a server that has, for example, 8 SSDs and 8 rotating
disk drives, all in a 1U form-factor chassis. This kind of hybrid storage
server is actually quite common among white box buyers, and is simply one
example of how white boxes can lead to total hardware optimization.

Once an enterprise has made the leap forward to using white
box servers, virtualization is the next method to use in order to emulate the
successful methods of the big guys, such as Google. The
recent progress in hardware virtualization, largely spearheaded by VMware, has
enabled the development of the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC), an entirely
virtual data center in which all elements of infrastructure – CPU, security,
networking, and storage – are virtualized and can be delivered to users as a
service. The software-defined data center
enables companies to rely no longer on specialized hardware, and removes the
need to hire consultants to install and program hardware in a specialized
language. Rather, SDDCs allow IT departments
to define applications and all of the resources they require, like computing, networking,
security, and storage, and group all of the required components together to
create a fully logical and efficient application.

One such virtualization software package
that can enable the effective use of an SDDC is VMware vSAN (virtual storage area
network). A vSAN is a hyper-converged software defined storage software product
that combines direct-attached storage devices across a VMware vSphere cluster
to create a distributed shared data store. vSAN runs on x86 white box servers,
and because vSAN is a native VMware component, it does not require additional
software and users can enable it with a few clicks. vSAN clusters range between
2 and 64 nodes and support both hybrid disk and all-flash disk white box
configurations. This combines the host’s storage resources into a single,
high-performance, shared data store that all the hosts in a cluster can use.
The resulting white box based vSAN SDDC has much lower first cost and up to 50%
savings in total cost of ownership.

Cost
Optimizing a Software Defined Data Center

Another strategy smaller companies can use to emulate the big
guys is to cut licensing costs by utilizing VMware intelligently on their white
box server. For example, if a company uses a standardized server from a legacy
manufacturer that comes with two CPUs out of the box and has to run the legacy
software that comes with the server, they may end up only using 20-30% of their
total CPU capacity. Despite this, that company will still have to pay for the
software licensing as if they were using 100% of their 2 CPU capacity, because
legacy software used in standardized servers is usually deployed using per CPU
(socket) pricing with no restrictions on CPU core count.

If that company instead uses a custom
white box with only one CPU with a high core count, and runs VMware, they can effectively
cut their licensing in half, as VMware uses a socket licensing policy. Cutting
licensing costs in half will often constitute a large amount of savings for a
company that they can spend elsewhere to further optimize their servers. This
utilization of virtualization software, as well as using it to put virtual
back-ups in place, are both key ways in which smaller companies can approximate
the methods used by the big guys.

Be
Like the Big Guys in your IT Infrastructure

Google, Amazon, Facebook, and others
do many things with their server infrastructure that not-as-big companies can
only dream about. However, companies can emulate the big guys in the server
world in significant ways. Just like the big guys, smaller companies can use custom
white box servers to fully optimize their hardware. Smaller companies can also
utilize virtualization software to save large sums of money in the form of
virtual storage servers and in cutting licensing costs. The result of companies
using these methods will not rival the scale of the huge data centers used by
the big guys, but in substance, the result will be the same: your own high
efficiency cost-optimized software-defined data center.